On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 7:06:25 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote: > > These are interesting things that you say, and indeed I'm postponing for a > while the wearing of the colored glasses for a week, primarily because I > would look weird at work with colored glasses all the time. But sooner or > later I will do the experiment, because it is also my belief that the > selected color will vanish. >
Awesome! I don't have the commitment myself, but I'll sure be interested to hear how that turns out :) > > Also, you ask what colors the dog will see. I believe it will be yellow > and blue. The reasons I'm giving in my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or > Understanding?" with reference to the Haidinger's Brush phenomenon, which > is yellow and blue: https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan If you > read it, I'm very curious what you think. I'm also talking about red, green > and most of the stuff that you mentioned. > > Though in the end there is a problem with this relational ontology. Indeed > red might disappear if you wear those glasses, because there would be no > relation to other colors. But what do you do when you talk about the full > experience of being conscious ? That experience, in itself, cannot be > compared to anything else, because by definition it is the full experience. > How is it maintained ? I'm also curious what the answer is. > > You overlook a lot of complexity when you make sweeping statements about "the full experience of being conscious." Do you mean a person's full experience in a given moment? Because surely that experience is an aggregation of qualia, with both internal relations (say between red and blue colour elements in the visual field), and relations with prior experiences. For example the feeling I have when I look at my dog right now is a highly complex aggregate of relationships with prior memories of her, other dogs, with innumerable experiences too complex and various to mention which are compressed into a kind of qualitative summary which is the feeling I have looking at her. My experience of the current moment in its totality is an inter-related collection of such relationships between the current and prior moments and experiences. Does this network of relationships in consciousness end at some primary irreducible atom of consciousness with the intrinsic property of being conscious? I say no. I say that that that web of relations ultimately merges into the infinite web of relations that is the cosmos, a web that has no fundamental properties that can be named or expressed in finite form. > On Thursday, 20 June 2019 04:07:43 UTC+3, Pierz wrote: >> >> No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed >> subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it is >> far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine if you >> could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before red became >> black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious of were >> redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness possible? Just >> pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself, outside of any >> relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you only have one colour >> receptor in your visual system, you have only one differentiator of >> elements in your visual field - brightness. If you have two colour >> receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red and yellow? Blue and >> yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not matter here - it's no >> guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor for what we call "blue" >> light, that it perceives what we call blue when it sees that colour. Indeed >> I doubt it, because blue is a differentiator of a trichromatic system, and >> specifically our, human trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red >> has its particular qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with >> red. What is red in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay >> attention. Green soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association >> with safe, sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing >> but" here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett, but I am saying that >> they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of those >> relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves - and I >> believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a week. >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d039913f-e3ab-4245-ba4b-280564b548a2%40googlegroups.com.
